Best Free and Open Source Interactive Fiction Tools

Gargoyle – Cross-Platform Interactive Fiction Player

Gargoyle is an IF player that supports all the major interactive fiction formats.

Gargoyle is focused on typography. The default fonts for Gargoyle are Bitstream Charter and Luxi Mono. They come provided with the software.

Gargoyle can use any TrueType, OpenType or Postscript font file.

Features include:

  • Subpixel font rendering for LCD screens.
  • Unhinted anti-aliased fonts: beautiful, the way they were designed.
  • Adjustable gamma correction: tune the rendering for your screen.
  • Floating point text layout for even spacing.
  • Kerning for even more even spacing.
  • Smart quotes and other punctuation formatting.
  • Ligatures for ‘fi’ and ‘fl’.
  • Plenty o’ margins.
  • Plenty o’ line spacing.
  • Integrated scrollback.
  • Use any TrueType, OpenType or Postscript font file you want.
  • Formats supported:
    • AdvSys – an object-oriented, LISP-like authoring system for IF, created by David Betz in 1986.
    • Agility
    • Alan 2 and 3 – consists of a programming language and a set of tools to support working in that language to create games.
    • Bocfel – an interpreter for the Z-machine.
    • Frotz – an interpreter for Infocom games and other Z-machine games.
    • GeasGit
    • Glulxe – a 32-bit portable virtual machine intended for writing and playing interactive fiction.
    • Hugo – Hugo Interactive Fiction Development System.
    • JACL – an interpreted computer language originally designed for creating interactive fiction.
    • Level 9
    • Magnetic
    • Nitfol – offers strict error-checking.
    • Scare
    • Scottfree – the Scott Adams compiler, sac, allows you create adventure games in a straightforward syntax, and compiles them into the format that was used in the classic Scott Adams adventures – and which is therefore now understood by scottfree and various other interpreters for those old games.
    • TADS 2 and 3 – Text Adventure Development System.

There haven’t been any new releases of Gargoyle for the past few years. This is a project that is definitely worth further development, to keep it working with the latest releases of the popular IF authoring systems.

Website: ccxvii.net/gargoyle
Support: GitHub code repository, Mailing List
Developer: Ben Cressey (originally developed by Tor Andersson)
License: GNU General Public License v2.0

Gargoyle is written in C++ and C. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

Return to Write Interactive Fiction


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